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Tuesday, 21 August 2012

23rd chapter

chapter @£ (23): the Era of the Ogres

Despite a common claim, Mr BooHoo was a real humanist in principle. His misanthropic feelings derived from human stupidity, malice, egoism, loose morality and disrespect towards other humans, animals and natural laws. Attitudes that most religions would classify as inhuman. Furthermore Mr BooHoo experienced all the above in a personal level and it saddened him. It was not life that was full of pain and suffering but living among other people. I shall repeat that his hate was not general, he would never kill for example, he would rather take all idiots and all bad people and let them live in a small island somewhere, so that they eventually exterminate each other. He would also be happy if it could go the other way; all the nice and bright people could form a country of their own and "live long and prosper" there happily ever after. And off course the place would be called Utopia. (sigh) Some individuals were worst than others and we are not talking about gangsters here, we are talking about everyday people that will do anything to bring you to their level and make you as miserable as possible. Whenever Mr BooHoo complained about the unfair, stupid and harmful behavior of people he met, to his mother as a child, she always said that he should be patient because the world was full of jack-asses and that he would encounter plenty more in the years to come. This made no sense. If a person was an evil jack-ass, in Mr BooHoo's mind, the victim should make the experience public, so that other people could know that this person was a bad jack-ass and avoid him or her, for their own sake. Nobody wants a thief or a rapist in their house so why should assholes be tolerated? We should he shut-up and accept such people in his life?
When Mr BooHoo reached adulthood (old enough to vote and drink legally) he left his home-town and went to a bigger city to study. There, he managed well-enough to keep asses out of his life as much as possible. At least the really harmful ones. Years passed and he finished studding and he changed jobs and he fell in and out of love and then he fell in love again and moved in with a partner and then, ass-hole wise the shit hit the fan. The partner was a great human being but there were Ogres in the family. This is how he got involved in the following story.

The head-Ogre was talking non-stop [it was a town Ogre, one of the kind that has learnt to use a fork and a knife and a computer to browse the internet, although it has failed to discriminate between truth and lies. The previously mentioned abilities have made it feel so confident of its wit that, as a greek saying goes, it thought it had caught the priest by the balls (nomizee oti ehei piasei ton papa ap' t' arhidia- a phrase full of sarcasm that describes an overconfident person with an inferiority complex that thinks he or she has an advantage or a good deal or understanding of something)]. Mr BooHoo was feeling that he was reaching the limit of bullshit he could hear being repeated without puking blood that would run out of his brain. Instead of putting on a set of head-phones and manifesting in this way that the speaker might as well be farting through its mouth, responded with a question. He hoped that it would make the Ogre shut up and reflect for a moment. The talk was about politics. The question was "How can you claim that it is different to vote according to your consciousness and according to what you believe is the best for the society?". Apparently the Ogres morality extended only to protecting primarily its own ass, its house and perhaps its children and the rest of the world can go fuck them selves and suffer slow and dreadful deaths. Not very ethical or good, is it?
The Ogre kept saying that public well-fare should be considered first but it did seam to have a quirky idea of what public well-fare meant. Further on, Mr BooHoo knew for a fact that the Ogre had been supporting the dominant conservative party because they helped it acquire an important position as a public servant. Instead of fighting a corrupt and unreasonable system it tried to be safe from it by being part of it. If anything, it had no right to tell other people what to vote and get aggravated when they didn't. In addition to the above the Ogre was older than Mr BooHoo so it was completely unfair to judge other young people for the current situation because it had contributed for long to the things being as they were. It even had the nerve to say that it was left wing at heart but that personal beliefs meant nothing when it came to electing a government. It had also said that it was alright to take advantage of unfair laws if there was profit in it, that women were the ones that should take care of the house, do the dishes and bring up kids but that it was ok to have a job to bring money to the house too, that (other) people should stay in their own countries and that there would be a world-war that would extinguish
all but a privileged ten percent of the current population of the planet and this was why it was important to finance a great army.
Apparently Mr BooHoo's ability to express an opposition to the things it said seriously bummed it, because it became offensive. It said that Mr BooHoo did not watch enough television or read enough newspapers to have an opinion, that he was a victim of left-wing propaganda (except that it never bothered to actually ask him what his political views were and what he thought of existing political parties) and that no person was educated enough to be able to align individual and public well-fare. Truth was that Mr BooHoo was a real book-worm and although the Ogre had visited the house where Mr BooHoo lived with his partner it never took the trouble to go through the titles and thus see that Mr BooHoo was interested in ideas and eventually politics and culture. Then it started misquoting ancient Ogre and false appeals to authority. Mr BooHoo was dumbfounded. He hadn't got involved to a conversation where one of the participants had so limited skills and so little respect for the fellow speaker, probably never before. The Ogre concluded its monologue by informing him that he spoke as the dumb people it met at the cafe where it spent its afternoons and that he was a bad conversationist because he did not lay out enough arguments. Mr BooHoo had almost reached the spot where his grief for humanity made him feel suicidal.
There was nothing he could do about this family. When he expressed a different opinion he was accused of being too much of a rebel, when he kept his opinion for himself he was accused of being dumb. They were everything he stood against of. Violent, short-sighted, miserable, small-hearted, arrogant, egocentric twats! And they understood shit because they wanted to understand shit. If Mr BooHoo said for example "A", they would not just say "B" because then there would be a common ground to argue that would potentially benefit both sides. They would just say "not A, I believe in 897(random number). Worst part was that in order to respect his partner's wish to see the family he would have to see them again and again. They made him feel as if the world was full of Ogres and that this time he would have to tolerate and do this in contradiction to his beliefs and this sucked.